environment — Page 6

→ September 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/29/18.

My awards ballots for the six major postseason player honors went up this week for ESPN+ subscribers, and I held a Klawchat Thursday to discuss them.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Reiner Knizia’s Blue Lagoon, a light/midweight game that plays very quickly but adds some strategy with complex scoring, and has a cover that might remind you of a certain Disney movie.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: This Politico piece on on the rise, fall, and change of heart of former hard-right Iowa state rep Kent Sorensen is the best thing I read this week. It speaks once again to the power of exposing bigots to the very people they profess to hate.
A Boston University doctor and researcher has made a career of testifying that cases of suspected child abuse are actually rare genetic disorders or vitamin deficiencies; in over ten years he’s never examined an abuse case and determined it was the result of actual abuse. This ProPublica piece highlights inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his statements, and details a case where Holick’s testimony resulted in a baby going back to an abusive parent who subsequently put her back in the hospital with a broken leg and bleeding in the brain. Why BU employs a child abuse enabler, or courts and juries find him credible, is not explained.
A UPenn professor and director of that school’s Annenberg Public Policy Center argues that Russian interference online gave Donald Trump the 2016 election – but she bases her assertion on data, not conjecture, laying out the case in greater length in her upcoming book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.
The Daily Beast looked at Barstool Sports’ history of bullying opponents and encouraging sexual harassment. Founder Dave Portnoy often doxxes critics, such as posting this piece’s author’s phone number on Twitter, a clear violation of their ToS, but was never suspended for doing so.
Methane trapped in Arctic ice is starting to leak out as the climate warms. A similar event at the end of the Triassic era warmed the planet so much it led to a mass extinction event that wiped out 76% of all species on earth.
I’ve written before here about how trauma affects the brain, including my review of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score. In the wake of multiple women stating that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them, NPR talked to scientists about how trauma affects memory, something that everyone should be taught in schools. We tend to think of memories the way we think of data storage – that we record the information, accurately, and have it there to be recalled when we run the appropriate mental script – but memories are fallible and malleable, with trauma a major reason why our memories of significant events are often wrong or incomplete.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked for a vote delay after previously signaling his support for the nominee, and the link there implies it was the result of assault victims confronting him in an elevator just hours before his announcement. I’d like to think this is true, and that Flake, who says lots of good things and then does nothing to back them up, has decided to take a stand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
This Twitter thread from a researcher who studies sexual violence includes information, with links to published research, on why we should believe women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who allege they’ve been assaulted.
Padma Lakshmi explained why she didn’t report her rape at age 16 in the NY Times.
ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs writes about Dr. Ford’s bravery, and watching the hearings as a sexual assault survivor herself.
We excuse young men who assault women because they’re young and their brains are still developing and we don’t want to ruin their lives. We excuse older men who’ve done it because that’s all in the past and they’ve changed since then, of course. Where in this framework do women matter?
America’s crumbling social infrastructure of libraries, schools, playgrounds, and fields is is hurting our democracy, writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg for The Atlantic.
In Texas, a state where most politicians think The Handmaid’s Tale is a utopian novel, the state’s attorney general is supporting a school district that expelled a student for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, a clear violation of the student’s First Amendment rights, in a case of blatant pandering for votes before November.
Professor of English and Cultural History Joe Moran writes in the Guardian about the difficult of writing a ‘perfect’ sentence, or even deciding what a perfect sentence is.
A new book called Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity argues that there have always been anti-vaxxers, according to this NPR interview with author Michael Kinch.
ProPublica also looks at the so-called “Jobs Alliance” in West Virginia where a coal baron is trying to block natural gas expansion that would actually help a growing industry with a viable future.
A Trump Administration analysis concluded that the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 so climate change regulations are pointless, bringing a whole new level of cynicism to public discourse.
Trump’s EPA immediately rolled back rules on coal plant pollution into waterways, raising the risk of heavy metal pollution during flooding like that caused by Hurricane Florence.
This long-ish excerpt from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book The Fifth Risk covers the tragicomic inside of Trump’s transition team and shows him as a man who didn’t believe he had any chance to be President.
One new board game Kickstarter of note – Fabio Lopiano’s Ragusa, co-published by Capstone Games, a company that focuses on heavy Euro titles it can translate and import to the U.S.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, first amendment, kavanaugh, links, mental illness, metoo, russia, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trauma, vaccines, west virginia

→ September 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/15/18.

My one ESPN+/Insider piece this week named my Prospect of the Year for 2018, with a number of other players who were worthy of the title but couldn’t unseat the incumbent. I answered questions on that and other topics in a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Disney’s Villainous, a card game that resembles deckbuilders (like Dominion) in mechanics, but gives you your entire deck at the start of the game. Each player plays as a specific villain, with a unique deck and victory conditions, so you learn each deck’s intricacies as you play.

And now, the links…

The best thing you’ll read this week is my friend Anthony del Broccolo’s letter to his late wife, who died unexpectedly in childbirth in June.
Now some longreads: Bleacher Report’s Mina Fader looks at whether concussions from playing football contributed to a 13-year-old’s suicide.
One of Osama bin Laden’s goals was to mire the west in endless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The Nation‘s Tom Engelhardt argues that we have given bin Laden his wish.
The use of WhatsApp to spread false rumors led to five killings of innocent men in India when those stories told users that there were child murderers on the loose.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks is women’s sport in ‘trouble’ as the divide between men’s and women’s sports becomes blurred by scientific advances showing that the split isn’t binary. The podcast rather deftly considers the science of intersex individuals and testosterone production as well as the moral and philosophical questions of fairness and identity, and the ethics of so-called ‘sex verification.’ Castor Semenya, who appears in a new Nike ad just released last month, appears prominently in these discussions, as the IAAF has introduced rule changes that seem to specifically target her.
The New York Review of Books chose to run a self-exonerating essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian commentator who has been accused by more than 20 women of sexually assaulting and/or physically abusing them. Their editor spoke to Slate about the decision and, in my opinion, absolutely embarrassed himself in the process.
Matthew Desmond, author of the incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, writes in the New York Times that Americans’ belief that jobs are the solution to poverty is wrong. There are structural obstacles to escaping poverty that we must address at the state and federal levels.
Economist Andrew Zimbalist was a longtime opponent of public funding for sports stadiums, but he changed his tune when he was paid $225 an hour by the city of Worcester for its funding efforts for a stadium to house the Pawtucket Red Sox.
I reviewed Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken in July, and she wrote on the same topic – the connection between factory-farming of chickens and the rise of antibiotic resistance – in a long read for WIRED.
Probiotic products – those containing bacteria believed to be beneficial to our digestive systems – are everywhere in the supermarket, the drugstore, the health food store, and more, but they’re probably useless when it comes to boosting your microbiome.
Salon/Rolling Stone looks at how Jimmy Page assembled the original Led Zeppelin lineup.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky asks why Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations for two months.
Brian Buelter writes that Kavanaugh’s repeated attempts to mislead Congress, now and in the early 2000s, are reason enough to reject his nomination.
The Wall Street Journal keeps misreporting the facts and research on gender dysphoria.
Arizona lawmaker Eddie Farnsworth (guess which party) is about to land a $30 million windfall thanks to a state board of education ruling allowing him to profit off converting his state-funded charter schools to nonprofit status. He’s running for the state Senate this November, and I guess he’ll have lots of cash for more campaign ads now.
The Guardian looks at how the Koch Brothers support laws like Arizona’s as part of their effort to undermine public education across the country.
South Carolina did not evacuate prisons in the path of Hurricane Florence, and you can draw your own conclusions why.
The mayor of a South Carolina town just outside of the state capital of Columbia posted anti-Islam memes and comments on Facebook, but then he met Muslim residents of his town and changed his views. Nothing beats intolerance and bigotry like exposure to members of the targeted groups.
A Texas school district is pushing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in a new curriculum that omits Hillary Clinton but remembers the Alamo. I doubt any single-year curriculum could ever satisfy everyone on what is included or excluded, but no public school district should be pushing religious values in its classrooms.
The Rio Grande, America’s second-longest river, is drying up, and nobody is doing a whole lot to protect it.
Facebook’s “fact-checking” protocols led a right-wing outlet to censor content from ThinkProgress.
Iowa’s favorite white nationalist Congressperson Steve King once again retweeted something from another white nationalist.
The Fix, a site dedicated to stories of addiction and recovery, interviewed comedian and former radio host Jake Fogelnest about his 12 years of sobriety.
The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece on Dustin Ackley, the #2 pick in the 2009 draft whose career may be over at age 30, with some great comments from Ackley on his own raging against the dying of the baseball light. If this is it for Ackley, who was the consensus #2 prospect in the draft after Stephen Strasburg, he’ll probably end up outside of the top 30 players in that draft class by WAR – he’s at #26 now and I see several guys behind him who will probably pass him within five years.
If you have the dungeon-crawl board game Clank! In Space!, the Apocalypse! Expansion is now available at retail.
Asmodee Digital announced they’re porting several popular board game adaptations to Nintendo Switch, including Catan, Carcassonne, and Pandemic.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: addiction, arizona, baseball, board games, cte, environment, gender issues, health, iowa, links, metoo, science, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas

→ August 25, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arizona, charity, environment, hugo award, links, medicine, pizza, pseudoscience, representation, science fiction, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

→ August 18, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times profiles the privacy activists who fought Google, Facebook, & other tech giants over how they used customers’ data.
This research paper from May finds that hospitals’ leverage results in large price swings (PDF) even across “undifferentiated” services between different facilities, one possible contributor to the rising cost of health care that any reform proposal will need to address. Directing patients to lower-cost providers for such basic services could save patients and insurers a significant amount of money.
Food writer Michael Twitty visits his ancestral homeland of Ghana for the first time, in the company of four African-American chefs, to eat traditional Ghanaian food and reconnect with his roots.
Dan Gillmoor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, calls on all journalists to work together to defend the freedom of the press and expose the degradation of key cultural norms that underpin our society, including voting rights, free speech, and opposition to corruption.
Dr. David Glosser, the uncle of White House policy adviser and xenophobic reactionary Stephen Miller, argues that Miller’s anti-immigration stance is ‘hypocritical’ because Miller wouldn’t be in the U.S. were it not for the same immigration laws Miller is trying to roll back. That’s not a perfect argument – I don’t think it makes Miller a hypocrite for arguing for tighter borders, but it makes his beliefs about the borders inconsistent with his own history.
The Philadelphia Citizen and its partners launched a series of related pieces on the high cost of being ‘broke’ in Philadelphia. For example, WHYY looks at how the cost and limitations of public transit reduce job options for poor Philadelphians.
At the Athletic, Melissa Lockard wrote about her husband’s passing this month at age 41 of a rare cancer. The piece is free for all readers, and is every bit as gutting as you’d expect.
This Royals Review post’s title makes it sound like a mere hit job on the team, but “It is possible that the Royals do not understand how numbers work” makes a smart, broader point that the team’s fealty towards Alcides Escobar is irrational based strictly on the math, without involving emotions at all.
Our jury system is not well built to adjudicate questions of science, a fact demonstrated yet again when a jury decided in favor of a man who claimed Monsanto’s Roundup gave him cancer. The main problem here is that you can pretty much never say what caused someone’s cancer; we can make educated guesses, of course, but cancer is aberrant cell division, and can happen without any apparent external cause.
Then the Environmental Working Group (EWG) opportunistically put out a press release claiming that they found excessive quantities of glyphosate (Roundup) in breakfast cereals, without putting their claims through peer review or explaining why they used a standard of 1/10,000th that of the EPA tolerance for glyphosate. Slate explained why the EWG piece and credulous media reports on it are all bunkum.
An ongoing measles epidemic has sickened over 100 people in 21 states already. And if people try to tell you measles isn’t that bad, ask them if they know about the fatal brain-wasting complication that shows up ten years later.
An 11-month-old boy had a stroke from catching the chicken pox from unvaccinated older siblings. (He was too young for the vaccination.) I don’t understand how this isn’t child neglect. The boy will likely have permanent neurological damage and is at increased risk of another cerebrovascular incident.
I linked to the #MeToo stories on Four Barrel Coffee over the winter, when the scandal first broke. Eight months later, the business is recovering but the owners haven’t divested to employees as they promised. Their reasons aren’t invalid, but when you state to the public and to your workers that you’re going to do something, failing to do so is a serious abdication of responsibility.
This New York Times story asks what happens to #MeToo when the harasser is a feminist professor? The answer, entirely predictably, is that other academics closed ranks around her, rather than believing her accuser.
Neo-Confederates – Christ, how is this even a thing – are now openly courting Russian assistance, which has to be a joke, not that I think these people are smart enough to punk the mainstream media, but white supremacists making friends with our main geopolitical adversary, today and from the last 70 years, is too ridiculous to be real. Of course, these neo-Nazi types ain’t the brightest bulbs.
First We Feast’s Hot Ones videos can be kind of amusing for the guests’ reactions to the spiciest hot sauces they consume as the interview nears its end, but most of the time, that’s been the only appeal for me. Their latest episode with Michael Cera is the best pure interview I’ve seen from the show – and he takes the million-Scoville hot sauce like a damn veteran.
KUOW looks at how Ohio used technology to help clear its rape kit backlog and asks why other states, like Washington, aren’t doing the same.
West Virginia’s Republican Party just pulled an end run around voters to pack its Supreme Court before this fall’s elections.
Joe Scarborough asks why the GOP has abnegated its responsibilities on Russia despite clear evidence that the country interfered in our elections and continues to do so, even trying to stop ongoing investigations into Russia’s efforts.
Georgia leaders are trying to close polling places in heavily Democractic precincts, citing ADA requirements to justify their attempts at voter suppression. The ACLU is fighting it, but the real problem is the 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
BuzzFeed profiled Parkland shooting survivor Jaclyn Corin, who is less famous than some of her classmates but is more instrumental in organizing the students’ movement for greater gun control.
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar on LGBTQ representation in animation and children’s series.
I’m not sure if this Vox piece on why adults find it hard to make and maintain friendships is all that accurate, but its points, especially about being a reliable friend, are worth considering.
Board games: If you’re familiar with the very fun One Night Ultimate Werewolf – which, I recently discovered, my six-year-old niece is shockingly good at playing – there’s a spinoff title, One Night Ultimate Super Villains, on Kickstarter now. It’s a little more kid-oriented in theme and language.
Starling Games has a Kickstarter going for a new expansion to its Alien Frontiers game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, environment, first amendment, health, links, privacy, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 11, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, environment, florida, health, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 14, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

No new Insider pieces this week; I’ll have a Futures Game wrapup Sunday night and an updated top 50 prospects ranking out on Thursday. I did hold a Klawchat this past week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the popular and very highly-rated new board game Rising Sun, from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Ancestree), a $100 game with meticulously-crafted miniature figures but a fairly straightforward set of mechanics around area control and negotiation.

In just a few hours, I’ll be DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose with Jay Jaffe to talk about our books and sign copies. The event starts at 6 pm.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA at 1 pm to speak and sign copies of my book as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian goes deep on how the Caribbean island of Nevis, half of the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, has become one of the world’s most secretive offshore havens for money laundering and tax evasion.
Was rum invented in India, not the Caribbean as generally believed? It sounds like it – but to what extent was rum invented rather than discovered? It’s the distilled byproduct of the fermentation of molasses, which itself was the waste left over from sugar production; millers left the molasses out in the sun, using it to feed slaves, and the stuff would ferment into the precursor of rum.
There are anti-vaxxers even in the world of horses, and the result is a fight against a vaccine for an equine virus called Hendra, a very deadly paramyxovirus that can also infect humans, and is among the candidates for the next global pandemic.
No sooner do I praise Italy for the quality of life over there than the new right-wing government says parents no longer have to provide proof of vaccinations for schoolchildren. Some useful phrases for Italian learners: il morbillo, la parotite, la rosolia = measles, mumps, rubella.
Increased use of nonmedical (i.e., bogus) exemptions has driven down vaccination rates in Arizona, spurring fears of loss of herd immunity for highly contagious, deadly diseases already present in the state like measles and pertussis.
The “white nose fungus” killing bats is spreading to more states and more bat species. Bats serve a crucial role in human agriculture, feeding on many pests that would otherwise destroy crops or encourage further use of pesticides.
There’s a lot more talk about plastic pollution lately, even in our destroy-the-EPA life as it is right now. Recycling alone won’t solve this problem; we need to make less, use less, and think more holistically about the life cycle of plastics. And as of this year, China won’t recycle the world’s plastic waste any more.
Deadspin ran this crushing letter from a parent whose preschool-aged daughter was molested by a relative. One key line, from the therapist the parent consulted: “Kids that age don’t make this kind of statement up, you have to take it seriously.” Bear that in mind when you read excuses made for a certain Oregon State left-hander who pled guilty to molesting a child around this age, and now has tried to deny it.
The U.S. economy is approaching the mythical threshold known as “full employment,” although such figures generally ignore unemployed workers who have chosen not to continue seeking work, or who are unable to for whatever reason. But full employment isn’t NAIRU, the non-accelerating rate of unemployment, so high inflation is eating most workers’ wage gains.
People often ask how I ended up choosing Delaware when I relocated from Arizona back to the east coast. One reason was its low taxes, and it turns out that Delaware’s tax burden is the lowest of all 50 states after you adjust for cost of living. I actually think our property taxes could be higher, especially if the funds could help improve the dismal schools in the city of Wilmington and boost its police force.
The San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve posted a note saying the 2017 GOP Tax Bill will boost the economy far less than promised, in part because the economy was already growing over the previous few years.
Mainers keep voting for Medicaid expansion and their racist governor Paul LePage, a Republican, refuses to implement it. He’s offered to go to jail rather than expand the program, to which I say, why not both?
I reviewed the new documentary about Fred Rogers the other day; the Observer has a piece on the ‘haunting doubts’ of Rogers and Paddington Bear, building off a line Rogers uttered to his wife shortly before he died, wondering if he’d been a good enough Christian in his life.
Stop ‘snitch tagging’ on social media. I block anyone who does this. If someone asks me about a player, don’t tag the player on my response. People doing that have largely driven me away from tweeting opinions on players, and leaving those opinions in chats or on ESPN.
A Republican state senator in Kansas who is running in a primary for a Congressional seat said “outside of western civilization is only barbarism”, and later clarified that he meant Judeo-Christian civilization … you know, the same civilization that enslaved over 10 million Africans not very long ago.
Neutrinos are one of the great mysteries of particle physics – long believed to be massless, now known to have unfathomably minuscule mass, interacting via the weak force and gravity, able to pass through entire planets without hitting anything – and for the first time, scientists detected neutrinos and identified their source galaxy.
The Daily Beast has a fun slideshow of the strange mix of stunning architectural styles in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Tweet of the week:

It’s so fucking weird that we scrape the seed pod of an orchid into ice cream and that flavor is considered plain.

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, caribbean, Economics, environment, italy, kansas, links, maine, physics, pollution, rum, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 12, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

The authors of the forthcoming book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things write for the Guardian‘s Long Read about how the chicken nugget is the true symbol of modern capitalism, a cheap, highly processed foodstuff that fuels inexpensive labor without regard for the cost on the environment or the people consuming them. The authors make many good points along the way, but I think none is more important than understanding that the meat we buy at supermarkets is already “processed.” The claim that “processed” foods are killing us ignores how much processing happens even in foods billed as “natural,” including meats, milk, yogurt, even some types of produce.
A junk study claiming the HPV vaccine caused neurological damage has been retracted by the journal that published it, two years after its release. The original publication led to a near total collapse of HPV vaccination rates in Japan.
The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson argues that if you’re anti-GMO, then you’re anti-science.
The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s history of domestic violence, which led to his resignation within days. Contrast that to Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, who has been accused of sexual assault and blackmail, and been indicted on felony invasion of privacy charges, but remains in office.
North Carolina is a ‘purple’ state, split fairly evenly between the two parties, but horrendous gerrymandering has given the Republicans a stranglehold on the state legislature. Meanwhile, Republicans in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania continue to push pro-gerrymandering cases and legislation to try to retain control of the legislatures in those states.
Mass shootings inevitably lead to calls for mental health policy reform, but there’s scant evidence linking these events to mental illness.
The Anti-Defamation League sent out a release saying that Twitter users sent over 4 million anti-Semitic tweets last year.
Weeks of protests in Armenia pushed Parliament to elect opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan as Prime Minister.
The Guardian‘s Kieran Devlin wrote about the songcraft of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison in the wake of the singer’s death, presumably a suicide, at age 36.
In the last week, three teenaged girls in India have been raped and burned, one of whom was killed after threatening to report her attacker to her family.
Writing for the Hardball Times, Rachael McDaniel describes growing up queer and finding inclusion in baseball.
Young Turks are increasingly rejecting Islam, turning to deism or even atheism in the face of a repressive, pro-Islam dictatorship. Turkey had been a secular republic since 1928, but President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has embraced Islamism as a way to strengthen his grip on power.
George Will writes that Trump is no longer the worst person in government; that title belongs to Mike Pence.
A Moroccan woman who was married to a Libyan dissident wrote about being kidnapped and tortured at a CIA “black-ops” site that might have been run by CIA director nominee Gina Haspel.
A student at James Madison University who was raped, reported it, and told her attacker did nothing wrong was also told speaking out about the incident could violate university policies. The school’s lawyer later apologized.
There’s a ‘crab crisis’ in Maryland due to a lack of workers for the seasonal industry, a result of the Administration’s hard line on immigration, but the affected fishermen refuse to make that connection. Cognitive dissonance is a real motherhecker.
Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman explains how the Russian payments to Michael Cohen may prove collusion, at least enough to enable Mueller to obtain probable cause for further warrants.
California has once again surpassed Great Britain to be the world’s 5th-largest economy (if we treat California as independent of the rest of the U.S.), despite progressive policies like higher minimum wages and taxes or bans on certain types of pollution. The growth has brought other negative externalities that the state will have to face, including rising homelessness and the pollution and economic losses of traffic.
Z-Man Games, now an imprint of Asmodee, acquired the great little social game Love Letter, which takes a 16-card deck and makes for a fun deduction game with lots of interaction that you can play in five minutes with three or four people.
Two new board game Kickstarters of note: Darwin’s Choice, another evolution-themed game (hi, Curt!) that has already funded but is open through June 5th; and Last One Standing, a battle royale-style tabletop game that’s past the halfway mark to its goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, british music, chicken, environment, history of food, india, links, Music, stick to baseball, suicide, turkey, vaccines

→ March 31, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/31/18.

Three new Insider pieces since last week: My annual season predictions post, a Grapefruit League scouting roundup (including Phils, Tigers, O’s, Rays, Pirates, and Atlanta prospects), and a draft blog post on three possible first rounders. No chat this past week, as I’m in North Carolina for the NHSI and am headed over to East Carolina today to see the two big bats for Wichita State.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, just in time to put one in every Easter basket you hand out this year.

And now, the links…

Vox’s Ezra Klein dissects the insidious racism behind Sam Harris and Charles Murray’s claims that there are actual, inborn IQ differences between races. (There almost certainly aren’t.) Harris, perhaps more widely known for his atheist writings and advocacy, responded by throwing a tantrum where he revealed private emails between him and Klein that revealed Harris himself to be by turns intransigent and an expert goalpost-mover.
The Guardian’s long read of the week is by a woman suing over her “dream” internship with the publication Monocle for unpaid wages.
The Atlantic, an intellectual literary magazine with a progressive tradition that dates back well over 100 years, hired alt-right troll Kevin Williamson, who proposed hanging all women who’d had abortions and referred to a black kid as 3/5 of a person when he wasn’t referring to the kid’s “primate gestures.”
A Stoneman-Douglas student writes in the NY Times that her efforts to be kind to mass murderer Nicholas Cruz did nothing to prevent him from shooting up the school.
The Washington Post reports that the maker of Peeps is trying to end its pension, leading to a protracted fight with its union and an ongoing lawsuit.
Senator James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma spoke to NPR of continuing effort by Russian troll farms to sow dissent online in the U.S., often by weighing in on both sides of hot-button issues.
Indiana’s Republican government appears to wish to emulate other states to its south, first with the anti-LGBT bill of a few years ago and now with a new bill that stigmatizes any woman who’s had an abortion and later reports any physical or psychological problems related to it.
The plastic residues from take-out food containers are polluting the world’s waterways, as these single-use items don’t biodegrade, but instead break down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic.
More from the Washington Post – I subscribe, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in good journalism and current events – on how studies of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum give researchers more evidence to fuel projections of the damage climate change will do to the earth.
Two great baseball articles this week, both connected to Nats players and authored by the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes. The first is a superb profile of Bryce Harper as the young superstar begins his walk year before free agency. The second profiles Eireann Dolan and her husband Sean Doolittle, calling them baseball’s most ‘woke’ couple.
Former New York Giants player Corey Widmer withdrew his name from Montana Football Hall of Fame consideration because of the sport’s link to concussions and CTE.
Two-time Top Chef alum Mike Isabella is facing multiple sexual harassment accusations.
Staring at tiny screens is ruining our eyes — and perhaps also making us pay less attention than ever to the world around us.
Facebook’s ad-tracking scandal isn’t just limited to that site; Most online publishing relies on the technology, even the outlets who are busy writing about Facebook’s privacy ‘problem.’
Cancer researchers discovered lung tumors with rudimentary digestive tracts, which probably isn’t as terrifying as it sounds but would make a good starting point for a sci-fi/horror film.
Florida’s legislature just can’t stop making public education there worse, such as allowing creationism into classrooms and, now, through state lawmakers ignoring conflicts of interest in pushing school choice laws. The swamp you want to drain may be in Tallahassee.
My friend Kelly Swails, an author of fantasy and YA fiction, wrote about changing her lifelong baseball rooting interest as a result of love, life, and being in the right ballpark at the right time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, environment, links, privacy, stick to baseball, top chef

→ January 13, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/13/18.

No new Insider content this week, as MLB appears to still be asleep and I was working on the top 100 prospects package, which is scheduled to start running on January 22nd. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Pandemic: Rising Tide, a standalone spinoff of the original Pandemic, this time pitting players against rising waters threatening to flood the Netherlands, so players must build dikes and pumps while trying to complete four hydraulic stations to win the game. We liked it, as it gives a new twist to the now-familiar cooperative mechanics of Matt Leacock’s various games.

Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.

And now, the links…

I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter is everything I wanted it to be and more.
That “gay wedding cake” case that was in the news last month? The bakers, who lost in an appellate court, helped spur an ongoing harassment campaign against the gay couple they refused to serve, including posting the couples’ contact information. The couple claims to be Christian, of course, but I doubt Jesus would be doxing anyone.
The New York Times looks at a French woman who made propaganda videos for the Daesh, was captured when Raqqa fell, and now wishes to return home. The quandary of what to do with citizens who fought for or with terrorists in Syria and are now coming back is facing many European countries.
Electric vehicles require a lot of cobalt right now in their lithium batteries’ cathodes, but demand may soon outstrip supply for the metal, most of which comes from the barely functional Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining for cobalt and coltan (also known as tantalite) has helped fund the last four decades of civil wars.
Pfizer announced it is folding its division working on treatments for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases after several failures in those two areas. It surprises me to see a major drug company walk away from a market that seems likely to grow in an aging world, although I suppose they could wait for a smaller company to develop one and buy the firm; Pfizer did announce they will start a venture fund for such efforts.
Grass-fed beef is trendy now, but the grass cows eat is getting less nutritious. The article cites a few reasons, but other research supports its claim that climate change is a major cause.
Speaking of (John B. McLemore accent) climate change, Grist argues that we need to get nuclear power back in the mix for our energy supply. It’s cleaner than fracking for natural gas, more efficient than wind or solar, and of course superior to coal in almost every way, yet cheap gas prices have made nuclear less economically viable and coal is taking nuclear’s place in markets where fear of nuclear power has made it politically toxic.
Climate change is one of several suspects behind the ongoing mass extinction of insect species, according to this long read from the Guardian.
Jeb Lund (aka @mobute) wrote that something racist fell out of the President’s shithole for 50 States of Blue. One aspect of this disaster I haven’t seen mentioned: Many of those countries Trump labelled with that epithet have natural resources, like cobalt, that we’re going to need. Maybe antagonizing them isn’t just racist or evil, but bad economic policy too.
While we were distracted with vulgarities and porn stars, Trump waived a punishment for Deutsche Bank, to whom he owes $130 million.
Also brushed aside by more lurid scandals was the report that Trump’s work day runs about seven hours. I wasn’t aware running the country was a part-time job.
The Trump administration rolled back an EPA proposal to take the pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market. Now scientists say the chemical is killing endangered salmon and the orcas that eat them. Previous research has found that chlorpyrifos can harm the brain of a human fetus or young child.
You will often hear commentators on the right decrying abrogations of free speech rights on left-leaning college campuses, but The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that conservatives are the ones truly threatening freedom of speech at American universities, including harassment of faculty members that has cost some professors their jobs.
Asmodee Digital officially announced the upcoming Steam port of Scythe, one of the best-reviewed heavy strategy board games of all time.
This WIRED story from 2015 looks at the underappreciated art of extreme metal band logos.
Vulture took a look at the backlash against Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri after the film won the top prize at the Golden Globes. I still have The Florida Project atop my personal 2017 rankings, with at least three major candidates still unseen.
I don’t know much about the game play, but Everdell, which already blew past its Kickstarter goal, might have the cutest board game art I’ve seen.
Restoration Games’ Justin Jacobson blogged about the development process behind Fireball Island, the next in their series of reissues of classic games. Past titles have included Stop Thief!, Downforce, and Indulgence.
Calliope Games has launched a Kickstarter for The Mansky Caper, a press-your-luck game with a robbery theme.
Jason Holt wrote a retrospective on helping write/translate the rulebook for Galaxy Trucker.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, board games, climate change, environment, links, stick to baseball, the swamp

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